


The Road to Heaven (Is Paved With Second Chances)

by Moorishflower



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-20
Updated: 2010-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:05:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/95793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been so long since Crowley Fell, and he has utterly forgotten how to fly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road to Heaven (Is Paved With Second Chances)

  
The memory of the Apocalypse that never was does not linger in the minds of those only peripherally involved. For some, it was merely a difficult time – a time of bad weather and unsolved murders. For others, it remains as a stain upon the soul. For them, it was not only a hardship to plow through, but the very possible, very _probable_ end of all things.

Crowley falls somewhere in between. There are days when he loses sleep over the memory of what _almost_ happened, but, for the most part, he finds himself able to rest easy. The Apocalypse was averted, after all. Lucifer was shoved back into his cage. The world was saved, no harm, no foul.

So why does he keep waking up in the middle of the night with the vague feeling that something is _different_? Not wrong, necessarily, but…something has changed.

Crowley glares into his pillow, and then tries to roll onto his back.

And fails.

"Bugger," he says, and resigns himself to sleeping on his stomach for the rest of the night, because it's far too late (or possibly early) to deal with anything less than his suite being on fire.

~

The First War saw Heaven losing whole garrisons of its angels, some to death, others to Lucifer. Crowley had not been the least of them, but it has been so long, since then, that he has utterly forgotten what it was like to be able to fly. To feel the solar winds beneath his true form, to be able to transport himself _above_ the ground, as opposed to below it.

Crowley peers at himself in the full-length mirror, scowling at the wings that have sprouted, huge and so dark they're almost purple, from his spine in the night. What he feels is an odd mixture of trepidation and excitement. It has been so long, and he is not so foolish as to see this as a second chance – or at least, certainly not a second chance on par with Gabriel, and Castiel, and many of the other angels who died in the line of fire.

But perhaps it is forgiveness. Of a sort.

~

The wings force him to exercise metaphysical muscles that have been lying dormant for centuries. It is a whole week before Crowley finds himself able to tuck them away, to that semi-space between Heaven and Earth. He is almost worried that he won't be able to retrieve them again, and that is disregarding the fact that the wings are almost certainly more trouble than they are worth.

But every night when he sleeps, he finds himself waking up cocooned in feathers. Which is interesting, and rather comfortable, but also embarrassing. It has been so long that he no longer has complete control over a part of him that was once as another pair of arms or legs.

~

Gabriel finds the whole thing terribly amusing.

"They're sexy," he laughs, and runs his fingers through Crowley's feathers, clever hands finding the kinks in the shoulders beneath and digging into them. Crowley spreads his wings, dark as an oil spill, and lets him.

"You should try flying again."

"I have no interest in flight when my own method of transport is perfectly acceptable," Crowley murmurs into the pillow. He feels, more than sees, Gabriel lowering his head. And then…_oh_. He feels _that_, Gabriel pressing his hot, open mouth to the joint where the wings connect to his spine. Wet and a little sharp. Crowley pushes his hips into the mattress, sensation washing over him. His breath stutters over his teeth.

"I'll trade you a blowjob for five minutes of flying with me," Gabriel whispers against his spine.

Crowley kicks him off the bed.

~

The second time Gabriel offers sexual favors in return for flight, Crowley throws a book at him.

The book's title, when he happens to look at it later, makes him pause.

The Anxiety Book, it says. _Overcoming Fear and Adversity_.

He takes it to the sink and sets it on fire. Just in case.

~

It continues for several weeks. In between the constant demands for attention and praise and sex, Gabriel will slip hints into their conversations, things like "You'd look really sexy if you had the wind blowing through your hair" or "I read an article the other day about how flight is necessary to keep birds' feathers healthy."

Well. They're hints for _Gabriel_.

And Crowley is getting a little sick of them, to be honest. He doesn't _want_ to fly. The very idea of it fills him with so much fear that he worries that he'll vomit all over the kitchen table. Consider, for a moment, that he _did_ decide to spread his wings, take off into the wild blue yonder, explore the air currents that he hasn't felt for _millennia_. Even if he made the choice, it would be _exactly_ like God to reach down at that moment and pluck the wings from his spine, leaving him thousands of miles up in the air and with absolutely no way to prevent his own, exceedingly messy, death.

Call him bitter, but he doesn't trust the bastard. Not after all these years of suspicious inactivity.

~

In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to go out onto the balcony for an early morning stretch.

Crowley unfurls his wings; they're huge and dark against the guileless blue sky. He enjoys the disparity – it makes him feel more powerful than he actually is, these days.

He's just getting ready to close his robe (it's the only thing he's found that he can sleep in, aside from his customary boxers, that allows his wings free range of movement) and go back inside when he feels _pressure_, against the base of his spine, just below the joints of his wings.

"I owe you like, a hundred blowjobs," Gabriel says, and then _shoves_, and Crowley tips over the edge of the balcony with a sound that might rightly be called a 'squeak.'

His suite is several stories up – when one is a high-level demon, one receives the best living arrangements available – and so Crowley spends the first few seconds in numb shock. He is going to _kill_ Gabriel. He is going to murder him and no force on Earth is going to be able to bring his smug, leering ass back from the dead, because Crowley is going to tear his vessel apart and bury the different pieces under a dozen different mountains.

And then a breeze catches his feathers, buoys him up for a brief moment, and he realizes that he has more important things to worry about.

Like _flying_.

But it has been so long, and his wings feel so _weak_.

He spreads them as far as he can, more then twenty feet across, and beats them once, a strong, downward thrust of motion that slows his descent. He does it again, and again, ignoring how the movement sparks pain in his joints, his wings unused to the stress of bearing his weight. He squeezes his eyes shut (no one, he thinks, wants to see Death coming for them head-on), and continues to beat his wings in increasingly powerful, increasingly desperate strokes.

When he opens his eyes, he is _above_ his apartment.

Which is something of a reverse of what was true before.

The wind pulls at his feathers, riots through his hair, and Crowley is fairly certain that he does not look nearly so rakish as Gabriel seems to think he would look. He's almost positive that he merely looks like a hot mess.

"Told you it was good for you!"

Speak of…well. Things that were being spoken of. Gabriel's wings cast shadows across the ground below, they are so vast, so magnificent. Crowley's are shabby and small in comparison, but when Gabriel beats his wings he creates miniature hurricanes, lofting Crowley higher and steadying him there.

He feels the brush of Gabriel's grey-brown feathers against his face, his arms and his legs, and knows that the archangel is wrapping him up, keeping himself aloft with power that Crowley no longer has. He cannot bring himself to be bitter about it.

"I'm going to cut your face off," he cheerfully tells Gabriel, and the archangel's expression dims.

"Before the blowjobs?" He asks, and Crowley thinks about it.

"Oral sex first," he concedes, and Gabriel whoops with joy, the wind rushing through their feathers, and Crowley thinks that maybe this isn't forgiveness after all.

Maybe it really _is_ a new beginning.


End file.
